Universal Pictures

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer


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Published: May 5, 2010

Preparation of guk, the customary Korean breakfast, is explained in great detail in one of the early chapters of Sonya Chung's Long for This World (Scribner, March 2). The passage isn't particularly important, but the description is a thoroughly conventional move for a certain kind of novel. Chung is good at assembling these conventions: Long for This World includes a wedding and a funeral or two, a few generations of a family gathering in a single house, and simmering cross-cultural conflict between the modern demands of youth and the dictates of tradition.

These elements aren't mere empty gestures. Like a useful cliché, most exist because they get at something universal; this is the case not only with soapy family dramas, but also romances and science fiction and cop thrillers. For some novels, it's enough to animate these relationships and shared experiences with the specifics of a situation or a culture. But Chung's story — anchored by long-ago emigrant Han Hyun-kyu's spontaneous journey back to his Korean hometown, and his combat photographer daughter Jane's trip to follow him — uses these commonalities to develop a circle of delicately drawn characters out of a series of resonant snapshots.

Chung builds her narrative out of those isolated, telling moments. They're not obviously stitched together, and she moves freely between different characters' histories and perspectives. But it's Jane whose particular vision provides a key to the whole. Her debate between love and lust, responsibility and self-gratification, defines her relationships to family and lovers and work. Even as Chung refracts this debate across other scenes and characters, she maintains her photographic style, careful in its reserve, with no unnecessary disclosure.

That sense of reserve also hovers over The Singer's Gun (Unbridled, May 4). Emily St. John Mandel's strange, spare novel also features a single central character working to define himself despite the legacy of family, and, like Chung, Mandel co-opts the structures of a specific genre to highlight this. Anton Waker's story begins in theft, with his parents fencing stolen goods and him helping a cousin peddle forgeries. After he makes a doomed attempt to live straight, with a pretty fiancée and a middle-manager's office, the last crooked job he's forced to pull becomes inevitable.

The Singer's Gun wears the trappings of a thriller, with an FBI investigation, a femme fatale and a double cross or two. But Mandel avoids tension, intentionally — time gets attenuated, stretched out in two central episodes, and she concerns herself much more with careful description and boredom and waiting than with tension. The criminal stuff is important as a canvas, but by removing the velocity of the thriller form, that canvas lets Anton carefully unpack the deeper issues of morality and obligation that his author's really interested in. Anton's vulnerability comes from his forged credentials, his self-definition. He lies to go straight; he's a genuine fake.

In her odd trio of narrators — a transgendered woman, the plastic surgeon she briefly lives with, and one of the surgeon's patients — Catherine Kirkwood's Cut Away (Arktoi, April 1) literalizes and embodies these issues of self-definition and genuineness. The novel starts with a mystery bred unnaturally from a family drama: the disappearance of a teenage runaway. Although the book opens with Olivia and moves forward because of her absence, Kirkwood's focus is on those her disappearance touches: Asa, her mother, the patient; Eleanor, the surgeon, whose card Asa finds in Olivia's room; and Alexandra, holding herself apart from the world she doesn't fit into, who gives Olivia shelter before the girl is gone for good.

The girl's disappearance pulls them together into an unstable triangle, and it warps and stresses each of them in unexpected ways. Kirkwood skillfully develops the issues of identity that these conflicts create; by rooting those issues in the physical world of appearances and transformation, she pushes them toward the Gothic. Asa — who contracts Eleanor to change her face, bit by bit, to more closely resemble her missing daughter's — provides an especially chilling version of Anton Waker.

But Kirkwood's strongest accomplishment is the figure she cuts for Alexandra. Living as a transsexual without gender-reassignment surgery, she creates the conditions to sustain herself out in the wastes of the desert. Even as Olivia's disappearance forces her to confront and challenge that sense of self, she comes out of the experience whole. Her story, thrown into sharp relief not only by Asa but also Jane Han and Anton Waker, represents an endpoint, a successful and idiosyncratic self-definition.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)